Animation &Animation Artifacts &Richard Williams 11 May 2009 08:01 am
Corny’s Raggedy Andy
- Every once in a while it pays for me to go back to 1976 and look at Corny Cole‘s magnificent work on Raggedy Ann & Andy.
Here’s one of the scenes I have – or at least the first half of the scene – in which Corny animated Andy standing and saluting. Ann and the Camel with the wrinkled knees sort of mull about in the background.
The drawings are incredibly light. I darkened them a bit in photoshop so that they’d be legible. They’re also done in a number of colored pencils. To top that off the paper is oversized (20×10.5) and difficult to flip. Since the art’s all the way to one side, I eliminated some of the blank side in the scans,
But the drawings are beautiful. Too bad the film, which was shot in Scope with Panavision lenses, was put on video in a cropped TV format with no regard to what was being cut off on the edges. (Not even pan & scan.) There’s been no DVD release of the film.
Here are most of the extremes all done by Corny Cole.
1(Click any drawing to enlarge it to the original size.)
2
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53
Corny Cole is certainly a one-of-a-kind in the animation community.
It was my pure good fortune to have worked with him this once.
Perhaps next time, I’ll put up some of his elaborate drawings.
On twos at 24FPS
Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.
on 12 May 2009 at 4:24 am 1.Steve Brown said …
Dear Michael,
thank you for posting this beautiful sequence of Corny’s! I never get tired of looking at his concept drawings for the film in that art of Raggedy Ann and Andy book. Simply amazing.
on 12 May 2009 at 1:41 pm 2.Janet Benn said …
Even those these are just the extremes, they are so beautiful. I like the drawings better than the colored version as seen in the film! I have one copy of this on VHS – it’s going to be one of the first I transfer for classroom use this summer. How did they do it? It’s magic.
on 12 May 2009 at 4:24 pm 3.Ethan said …
Thank you for publishing these drawings, I really like to see Corny’s work. Do you have any of the work he did on Nemo? I saw some of his drawings for that years ago, I’d love to see them again.
on 12 May 2009 at 7:11 pm 4.Jenny said …
His drawing is so, so beautiful.
For some reason ever since I first saw it I can never forget a page in the “Making of” book, a line Dick W. wrote on one of Corny’s proposed designs for a sock creature. It was something like this: “These dots [line drawn pointing to them] will add nothing but shimmer and boil”-with Dick’s corrective sketch next to it. I thought,good grief, jeez…here are these absolutely gorgeous drawings-and here are tough crits from the director. It seemed a lesson in “yes, great–BUT” animation studio production.
I’ll also never forget the impact of all those ball point sketches…the drawings of the french doll, the Captain, everything. Good god. Real beauty and form in line.
on 14 May 2009 at 3:32 am 5.Steve Brown said …
The irony is that, since the fire, Corny doesn’t have any original drawings from the film himself.